What do you do when you’ve prepared for a single-handed around-the-world sailboat competition, have a great 40-foot high-performance boat ready to go… and then the race is called off? Go. That’s what ...
Rarely do I really enjoy a cruising memoir that melds a family story with descriptions of white-knuckled adventure. I also tend to identify with solo sailors or the male half of a cruising couple, bei...
Protagonist Emmeline “Em” Ridge is a boat delivery captain of limited experience. Newly widowed, her husband having died in a kayak accident, she lives on a tidal island just east of Portland, Maine, ...
Author and Olympic sailor Carol Newman Cronin’s fourth novel, Ferry to Cooperation Island, takes readers to a fictional setting in Rhode Island Sound between the real Block Island and Newport, where t...
This is the perfect book for these times. When you can’t get out cruising on your own boat (very far, anyway), voyage logs like this one help to cure stuck-on-land blues. The title doesn’t lie: it’s t...
…and Two More Lift-Keel Performers Issue 135: Nov/Dec 2020 Everyone knows that deep draft improves sailing performance but restricts cruising options. The ability to reduce draft would certainly...
Edson Marine clearly has an eye for what the market needs, adding to its products a garden hose connector fitting made by Banjo, one of the best-known manufacturers of this style of fitting. It’s an i...
In my experience, quick-release fire extinguisher mounting clasps are cheaply made and easily broken. Bungee cord can solve part of this problem, but it eliminates any quick-release capabilities. A be...
“We are inching toward the middle of nowhere,” reads an entry in Michael’s log of the cruise of Juliet, a CSY 44 sailboat that is carrying the Partlow family of four through the San Blas Islands of Pa...
Laura S. Wharton’s debut novel The Pirate’s Bastard, is set in colonial America in the first half of the 18th Century. This was an exciting place, especially for a young, ambitious man like Edward Mar...
I wonder how many sailors secretly long for a relationship with, or owning or at least experiencing, a wooden boat. Though most sailboat owners nurture fiberglass craft, my guess is that deep down ins...
Steering chains lurk unloved, out of sight, in one of the toughest environments on the boat, a constantly damp bilge. And steering failure ranks near the top of the list of reasons why boats are aband...
Marlow Blue Ocean, as far as I know, is the first dockline made entirely from recycled bottles. Though counterintuitive, plastic water bottles are made from the same polymer used to make virgin polyes...
Amongst the hundreds of sailors I’ve known, only one kept the same boat nearly his entire life; she was a sweet 17-foot Silhouette, with bilge keels, that my friend Bob maintained flawlessly, a...
A good writer doesn’t tell readers their story, they show readers their story. I know that Randy Baker succeeded on this front because I felt like I was almost aboard with he and his wife, Cheryl, whe...
…and Two More Freestanding-Rigged, Solid Sailers. Issue 134: Sept/Oct 2020 Looking for boats to compare to the Nonsuch 36, the obvious commonality has to be the freestanding rig. That cer...
A fast, Big Catboat Whose Watchword is Simplicity. Issue 134: Sept/Oct 2020 Wendy and Frank Glanznig were beating up Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay in a CS30 sloop, tacking hard upwind with rails un...
As the title suggests, protagonist Paul Williams lives a simple life. He’s a single dad living aboard a 26-foot plywood boat, moored in an almost abandoned marina known as Davison’s Dyke, ...
If you were to try and pick the day (yes, the very day) that the United States was founded, what would it be? The founding of Jamestown? The arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers? The Declaration of Independ...
Ready to Come About is both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. I met the author, Sue Williams, and her husband, David, when they delivered a presentation to our yacht club. Their tale was so fascin...
Sea Trial is two and a half stories in one, with each story perfectly complementing the other. Brian Harvey, accompanied by his wife, Hatsumi, and miniature schnauzer, Charley, set out to circumnaviga...
A variety of factors contributed to the end of yacht design’s golden age. Issue 133: July/Aug 2020 I recently finished reading Dick Carter’s autobiography, Dick Carter: Yacht Designer in the Gol...
… and Two More Performance-Influenced Cruisers Issue 133: July/Aug 2020 In the late 1960s and early ’70s, boats designated as “cruising yachts” tended to follow the Colin Archer/William Atkin model of...
An inspired, tough, seakindly cruiser Issue 133: July/Aug 2020 In the mid-1970s, naval architect William “Bill” Ion Belton Crealock entered a sailboat magazine’s boat design contest. Though already a ...
I don’t read romance novels; this is the first romance novel I have ever read. But this book was given to me by a good friend who billeted Carol Cronin in her home during the Snipe North American Cham...
This book is a manual, a fundamentals textbook for managing a sailboat when crew is short or non-existent. That is not say its message is aimed at solo-circumnavigators or adventure-minded bluewater c...
…and Two More Bright, Solid Cruising Performers Issue 131: March/April 2020 The late powerboat designer Tom Fexas once published a provocative article entitled “Sailing Is Silly” in which...
A Raised-Saloon Cruiser for Two Issue 131: March/April 2020 For 14 years, Rosie and Carl Anderson sailed their Bombay Clipper 31 throughout the coastal waters of western Florida. But after an e...
Shipwreck! What does that word conjure in your mind? Adventure, mystery, cold dark places, treasure, risk, betrayal, intrigue? All of it is delivered generously in this book. A cast of fourteen Atlant...
Pirate is an NYU professor’s telling of his adventures aboard Pirate, a 1974 Swan 38 he purchased in 1989, only four years after he learned to sail. The number of miles that pass beneath a yacht’s kee...
